Editor’s note: Vincent Van Gemert is a software engineer at Floorplanner , an online floor planning application which launched in June on the Google Apps Marketplace. launching it on the Google Apps Marketplace. The Google Apps Marketplace is a great platform to get new clients, show off our product and integrate Floorplanner with the services Google provides. At the beginning of the summer we tried to launch our application on the Marketplace. We found out that a lot of people were struggling with the existing Rails libraries and the OAuth authorization method, therefore we would like to provide this tutorial to help other developers. I would like to thank Dušan Maliarik for building this implementation with me and finding the solution for using the two-legged OAuth authorization.1. The initial setup Before you start programming there is some required setup. You first have to add a new application on the Google Apps Marketplace. You will need a Vendor Profile for this and a Google account. Sign In to the Marketplace with your Google account and go to your Vendor Profile using the link at the top-right of the Marketplace homepage.<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?> setup page . During the installation process of the application you will be redirected to the URL you specified in the manifest under “setup”. This is useful for collecting additional information necessary for configuring the app, or setting up a new umbrella account for the company. The umbrella account allows you to use other users of the domain as sub-users. You can also retrieve other information, like the administrators of the domain, the logo of the Google Apps account, or the domain name of the Google Apps account. If you don’t want to redirect customers to your site during the installation process, then just remove the line from your manifest.2. Rails libraries and OpenID The code you’re going to use relies on several Rails plugins and gems. The plugins/gems needed for this tutorial are listed below.properly configured realm as access is granted by the administrator for all of their users. This process can be found in the example code below.def login Creating a Listing page in the Marketplace developer documentation.3. Using the Google Data APIs When using the Google Data APIs outside of the Apps Marketplace you have to get access to a user’s data using three-legged OAuth, AuthSub or ClientLogin. These authorization methods require your application to redirect the user to Google’s site to request authorization. Because you’ve already authenticated the user by using OpenID and an administrator has granted authorization to the user’s data when they added your application to their Google Apps domain, you don’t want to use these methods.granted the appropriate permissions . Because the administrators have granted permission on behalf of their users, each user does not need to be prompted individually.CONSUMER_KEY = "Your-consumer-key" OAuth Playground to find out the differences between our own request and the working request. After numerous tries we found out that we need to specify the HTTP method in order to get it working. It was important to use the Net::HTTP::Post request when sending information and Net::HTTP::Get request when retrieving information. This sounds logical, but it also needed to be done when retrieving the authorization header in the OAuth Client Helper, as well as in the Net HTTP request. Now we have this code, we can generate a request for almost every call in the Google Data API’s.Google Docs documentation .def submit_csv_to_gdocs Google Apps Marketplace Developer overview for more information and to see which API’s you could use and how to use these. I would advise to check out the OAuth Playground if you have any problems with authorization. Using the playground with two-legged OAuth is very easy. Just follow these steps:Set the signature method to HMAC-SHA1 Type in your consumer key and consumer secret (these can be found in your Vendor Profile) Set your Feed URL (step 6) Set GData-version to 3.0 unless the API only supports 2.0 Click execute Google Data APIs Ruby Utility Library . I haven’t done that yet but am planning to look into that soon. If you have any questions or comments, I would love to hear from you. You can email me at vincent@floorplanner.com.Want to weigh in on this topic? Discuss on Buzz
8 comments :
Yeah it took me quite a bit of trial and error while implementing two-legged auth support for https://github.com/nfo/gmail_xoauth
GREAT INFORMATION ON integrating with rails
It looks like you're using the open_id_authentication plugin in your code, but you don't say that explicitly. Unless I'm missing something.
Yes, the method 'authenticate_with_open_id' comes from the gem 'open_id_authentication'.
Also, in the marketplace help pages, they provide the google-api-client gem to communicate between the Rails app and the marketplace API using 2-legged OAuth.
Before yestarday it was impossible to use google-api-client with Rails because of a conflict between ActiveSupport and extlib. It has been fixed this night by the developpers :)
http://code.google.com/p/google-api-ruby-client/
Yes, the method 'authenticate_with_open_id' comes from the gem 'open_id_authentication'.
Also, in the marketplace help pages, they provide the google-api-client gem to communicate between the Rails app and the marketplace API using 2-legged OAuth.
Before yestarday it was impossible to use google-api-client with Rails because of a conflict between ActiveSupport and extlib. It has been fixed this night by the developpers :)
http://code.google.com/p/google-api-ruby-client/
It looks like you're using the open
Thank you Michel for answering the question. Your absolutely right. I'm also using the open_id_authentication gem. I've got this question several times.
You don't really need the OpenID authentication. I've used it to show you how to get the email of the Marketplace user easily without the user interaction. It is also possible to get the email by using a form for example.
is there any API to send data from rails application to google docs directly?
urgently required please help me ASAP
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